Opening Nights at the Opera 1641–1744

Cambridge University Press 0521851459 - The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid P. J. Heslin Excerpt More information 1 Opening N ights at the Opera 1641–1744 Eccoti ò Lettore in questi giorni di Carnevale un’Achille in maschera. Preface to L’Achille in Sciro, Ferrara 1663* ver the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- turies, the story of Achilles in Scyros was represented many times on operatic stages across Europe. Given the nature of the young genre, it O 1 is not hard to see why this motif was popular. To illustrate the principle, contrast the Elizabethan theater, where the custom of boy actors playing the parts of women lent a certain piquancy to plots in which a female character dressed as a man: thus a boy played a woman playing a man. In Baroque opera, the situation was reversed. The primary roles were almost invariably scored for high voices, which could only be sung by a woman or a man whose secondary sexual 2 characteristics had not developed. In most cases the choice between a female singer and a castrato seems to have been determined by the local availability of 3 singers rather than the pursuit of naturalism. It was not impossible to see the * “In these days of Carnival, here is Achilles wearing a mask for you, dear reader.” On this text, see below (p 11). 1 Thus Rosselli (1992: 58). 2 This was accomplished by cutting the spermatic cords or by orchidectomy before puberty: see Jenkins (1998) on the procedure and physiology, and on the social context, see Rosselli (1988)or more succinctly Rosselli (1992: 32–55). 3 “In early opera, voices were chosen for their beauty, their potential, their virtuosity, and not for their gender” (Dame, 1994: 149). “Statistically it was the age of the character rather than his or her gender that quite observably determined the choice of tessitura. The rule was, the younger the character, the higher the voice” (Durante, 1998: 386). On this problem, see Durante (1998: 385– 8), Covell (1984), and Harris (1989: 110–14). Heller (2003: 18) claims that in seventeenth-century 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521851459 - The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid P. J. Heslin Excerpt More information 2 the transvestite achilles role of Mark Antony interpreted by a woman while opposite her Cleopatra was 4 played by a male castrato. Except in the public theaters of the Papal States, where women were often prohibited from appearing on stage and thus castrati were the rule, heroic male roles were commonly interpreted by female singers. Thus in the Naples production of Achille in Sciro discussed below (p 38), the two leading ladies, Vittoria Tesi and Anna Peruzzi, are reported to have quarreled 5 over who should play Achilles and who Deidamia. When the character of Achilles on the island of Scyros was interpreted by a woman, the audience saw a woman playing the role of a man pretending to be a woman. When Achilles was played by a castrato, the unveiling of the “girl” as a “real” man might have forced the observation, despite the accepted con- ventions of the genre, of a contrast between the fictional character who sheds his ephebic androgyny on Scyros and the singer who cannot. Whatever the casting of Achilles, the situation on stage will have tended to produce for the audience a complex counterpoint of biological sex and social gender. A crude taxonomy divides the librettists who dramatized this story into two groups ac- cording to how they comment on this relationship between sex and gender. For some, such as Giulio Strozzi, Ippolito Bentivoglio, and Carlo Capece, the myth of Achilles on Scyros embodies the spirit of Carnival: the greatest hero of antiquity puts on a female disguise to pursue his amorous desires. As we shall see, these libretti tend to portray gender as a masquerade, and they abound in complex erotic schemes and sub-plots. For some later writers, such as Pietro Metastasio and Paolo Rolli, the myth teaches the opposite lesson: gender is not contingent but essential, in that the masculinity of Achilles is a primal force of nature that cannot be concealed, despite the efforts of his divine mother and his own devotion to Deidamia. For these writers, the masculinity of Achilles is an aspect of his heroism, which is in turn a product of his illustrious birth. On this reading of the myth, Achilles is a figure who exemplifies the triumph of a noble nature over unprepossessing circumstance; as we shall see, this interpre- tation of the story has political ramifications for an age torn apart by successive wars in which disputes over legitimate royal succession barely veiled the raw exercise of power. In discussing these libretti, I hope to show that this double potential for the myth to encode two diametrically opposed conceptions of masculinity is derived not only from the content of the myth itself, but also from Statius’ sug- gestive manner of treatment. One of the peculiarities of this complex tradition, Venetian opera, many of the heroes played by castrati had, like Achilles, a masculinity that was compromised in some way. 4 Durante (1998: 386). 5 Interestingly, considerations of naturalism were called upon to justify the choice of the taller Tesi for the role of Achilles, but this may have been a specious, post hoc argument invented to pacify Peruzzi: Croce (1947: 166). © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521851459 - The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid P. J. Heslin Excerpt More information openingnights at the opera 1641 – 1744 3 however, is the unwillingness of any of these authors to identify Statius as a source, even when his direct influence is unmistakable. The decline of Statius’ reputation as a poet was well under way, and the last of the poets discussed here, Paolo Rolli, seems to be the first not to have known the Achilleid at all. This operatic tradition is the swan song of a once well-known classical text whose influence was already on the wane. Venice, 1641 The element of masquerade in the Achilles-on-Scyros myth was ideally suited to the carnivalistic context of much early operatic spectacle, and it was in seventeenth-century Venice that the opera and Carnival had come together most perfectly. The first treatment of the Achilles-in-Scyros story for the operatic stage was called La finta pazza or “the woman feigning madness.” This work, with a libretto by Giulio Strozzi and music by Francesco Sacrati, has been called “the first and possibly the greatest operatic ‘hit’ of the [seventeenth] 6 century. It set the standard for measuring operatic success.” La finta pazza inaugurated the Teatro Novissimo in Venice, the world’s first purpose-built opera house; it launched the career of the first operatic diva, Anna Renzi; and it started the tradition of the “mad scene” for operatic heroines that eventually 7 produced Lucia di Lammermoor. It travelled all over Italy as the epitome of the new type of Venetian opera, which had been born, not in the salons of Flo- rentine intellectuals or the palaces of Roman nobles, but in the public theaters of Venice. Some of the noteworthy features of this new, mercenary type of operatic production were astonishing stage designs that employed perspective and movable scenery, and extravagantly melodramatic plots that abounded in incident and spectacle. Statius’ version of the story of Achilles on Scyros serves Strozzi as mere scaf- folding for a more important sub-plot in which Deidamia feigns madness, a 8 story which has no ancient source. Many early opera plots, despite the genre’s claims of kinship with Greek tragedy, were in fact based on mythical love sto- ries familiar from well-known Latin texts, treated very freely: Orpheus from the fourth Georgic, Ariadne from Catullus’ poem 64, Daphne from the first 6 Rosand (1991: 90). The libretto is available in Della Corte (1958: 333–430). 7 Rosand (1991: 88–98, 110–24); Bianconi and Walker (1975). 8 The origins of this “mad scene” go back to a time when Monteverdi suggested an opera based upon a pastoral poem of Strozzi’s. Tomlinson (1983) has demonstrated that this project, called La finta pazza Licori, never really got off the ground, but much interest in it has been generated by the surviving letters of Monteverdi, which record his thoughts about how to represent madness in music. There is no ancient connection of the Scyros myth with feigned madness except perhaps via the story of Ulysses feigning madness in an attempt to avoid coming to Troy, which is a kind of draft-dodging double of the Achilles-in-Scyros story, in which feigned madness is substituted for feigned womanhood. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521851459 - The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid P. J. Heslin Excerpt More information 4 the transvestite achilles book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dido from the Aeneid, and singing shepherds from the Eclogues of Virgil. Likewise, Strozzi’s libretto takes the general linea- ments of the dramatic situation from a familiar Latin text. The influence of Statius is apparent in the basic details of the plot: the worry of Thetis for her son, the mission of Ulysses and Diomedes to Scyros, and the stratagem of unveiling Achilles by tempting him with a gift of weapons. Strozzi, however, soon goes off in his own direction; with its broad humor, sprawling plot, gratuitous digressions, weak characterization, and emphasis on the theatrical elements of masquerade, travesty, and play-acting, La finta pazza is a quintessential early 9 Venetian opera libretto.

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